Rutgers is a fine institution committed to building a respectful community. Parsing abusive conduct without regard to its impact on that community, its organizational values, reputation and overall brand is narrow, shortsighted and unworthy of the university.

Today, we focus on distributing Codes of Conduct, policies, check-the-box learning and other communications to prevent compliance and ethical disasters. Bud Krogh's message suggests we give greater emphasis to basic leadership and citizenship, not just rote standards.

We talk about performance as being the key metric which drives decisions. But too many choices are still guided by irrelevancies or illegalities. We can have every smart device available—or soon to be created—but they don't eliminate our own biases; they magnify and reveal them.

We should be considering how to make sure that all of our learning methods address conceptual resistance if we want our investment in education and talent to yield the best results, which is to prevent, detect and correct problems before they lead to workplace disasters.

Our lives will be enriched by technology with advances in learning and communication beyond the limited horizon of our vision. As we move forward, though, we need to take measured, careful steps and keep in mind that learning at work needs to produce ongoing results … not high scores for our permanent record cards.

Every organization whether in sports, business, academia, or government has rules. But they're enforced retroactively, after the damage is done. We need to think more about the costs of our actions before we do them and temper our desire to win with integrity.